Wednesday, 4 May 2016

The Truth

At last, everybody has agreed. Since last week, The Truth
about Hillsborough is out and undeniable.

At the end of the longest jury case
in British legal history, 27 years after 96 Liverpool fans died in a crush at
Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough Stadium, an inquest jury unanimously cleared
the supporters of any blame for the tragedy, and found by a majority verdict
that the 96 had been unlawfully killed due to what reports described as ‘a catalogue
of failings by the police and ambulance services’.

The political and media class raced to show their support
for the Hillsborough families, whose long campaign to clear their loved ones’
names and expose the official cover-up had finally won what headlines declared
as ‘Justice for the 96’.

The great and good turned in apparently unanimous
horror to point fingers at the senior police officers held most responsible for
the deaths and the cover-up – former chief superintendent David Duckenfield,
who was in charge on the day in April 1989, and South Yorkshire chief constable
David Crompton, who was suspended after the inquest verdict.

Get those two top
cops and a few more in the dock, the consensus seems to be, and it will finally
be case closed.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Here are just a few of
the other truths they want us to forget about.

1)
There is still a cover-up

There has been much condemnation of attempts to disguise
what really happened at Hillsborough and to divert responsibility on to the fans.

These attempted cover-ups range from theSun’s
notorious front page declaring ‘The Truth’, which, days after the disaster,
falsely alleged drunken Liverpool fans had caused the crush, robbed the dead
and abused rescuers (for which the paper made a front-page apology in 2012), to
South Yorkshire Police’s barristers’ re-raising of allegations about drunk and
aggressive fans during the inquest evidence.

Yet, as we argued onspikedlast year, when finger-pointing at
former CSI Duckenfield began in earnest, ‘Blaming one top cop is a cover-up,
too’.

And so is blaming two top cops.

The emphasis on the undoubted failings,
errors and misjudgements by individual police commanders on the day entirely
avoids a key issue: the wider political and policing context which enabled
something like Hillsborough to happen.

Why were thousands of Liverpool supporters caged in a steel
pen in the first place? As some fans tried to climb out to safety, why was the
first reaction of police officers to throw them back into the cages?

Why did
the police react to the unfolding horror at the Leppings Lane end by forming a
battle line across the middle of the pitch, as if dying and injured Liverpool
fans might somehow rise up and charge the opposition supporters of Nottingham
Forest?

And when the scale of the disaster became clear, and the authorities
finally moved to deal with it, why was there a fleet of police ‘hoolivans’ yet
only one ambulance in attendance at the ground for that 1989 FA Cup semi-final?

None of these had much to do with incompetence or
misjudgement.

They were the results of a deliberate state policy, pursued from
the Conservative government downwards and backed by the media, of treating
football fans as a cross between animals and prisoners of war.

Having declared war on the organised working class in the
old trade unions, Margaret Thatcher’s government was pursuing a paramilitary
campaign against the unorganised working class on the crumbling terraces.

Tory
proposals to impose a system of compulsory ID cards on football fans – and
solely for football fans – were only reluctantly shelved after Hillsborough.

The law-and-order drive at football created a situation where many of us who
had been trapped in those steel cages before sensed that any big match was a
Hillsborough waiting to happen.

2)
The heroic Hillsborough families have been used as ‘human shields’

The families of Hillsborough victims and survivors of the
disaster are now hailed as national heroes, and deserve nothing but praise for
their tenacious campaign.

Yet we should recognise that they have also been used
as ‘human shields’ by those authorities seeking to sanitise and control
football – including many who sought to join them in a chorus of ‘You’ll Never
Walk Alone’ last week.

A glance back at the initial government statement on
Hillsborough in 1989 shows how the Tories saw it as an opportunity to pursue
their agenda of ‘cleaning up’ the unruly proletarian pastime of football.

Home Secretary Douglas Hurd announced to the House of Commons the setting up of an inquiry
under Lord Justice Taylor.

This would consider issues of crowd safety at
football, but Hurd also made clear that ‘an important part of that must be
protection against hooliganism and violence’.

In this context, the Tory cabinet
minister repeated the government’s pre-Hillsborough support not only for a
national identity-card scheme, but also for all-seater stadiums.

When Lord Justice Taylor eventually published his report,
it duly demanded all-seater stadiums along with other restrictions on fans at football
matches.

Taylor justified these measures in order to improve the comfort and
safety of supporters – but also to improve their behaviour.

As his report into
the ‘poor facilities’ at English football’s decrepit stadiums concluded: ‘This
inhospitable scene tends to breed bad manners and poor behaviour. The
atmosphere does not encourage pride in the ground or consideration for others.’

Over the intervening years, we have witnessed a sustained
crusade to sanitise football and make it fit for new, middle-class fans.

As a
result, we are left with more comfortable, all-seater stadiums that are also
often atmosphere-free.

And anytime anybody questions these trends – for
example, by proposing the introduction of ‘safe standing’ areas and beer, as
enjoyed by German fans – the authorities hide behind the Hillsborough families
to denounce their ‘irresponsible’ critics and declare ‘Never again’.

3)
How you see The Truth depends which side you are on

It seems that everybody now accepts the truth about
Hillsborough, as insisted upon by the campaigners for years and endorsed by the
inquest jury last week.

Which ought to raise the question: why then did
everybody apparently go along with the cover-up of the truth for so long?

Of course, they didn’t. Many people saw through the lies
about Hillsborough from the start.

I was then the editor of a weekly newspaper
calledthe next step,
published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (both long deceased).

In
response to theSun’s
notorious front page about drunken, abusive fans, we published a front page
under the same headline – ‘The Truth’ – which provided our own bullet-point
version of events:

‘* Thatcher led the law-and-order drive which caged fans *
Police treated dying fans as a public-order problem * Press liars abused the
dead to cover up the truth.’ We did not claim any great powers of insight to
reach these quick conclusions. It was a matter of being on the side of
working-class football fans against the government and the police.On the other side of that divide, some people saw The Truth
differently, because it suited their own political perspective. The story
published in theSun– and reported elsewhere in the media,
though under less provocative headlines – was not dreamt up out of thin air,
but based on claims made by senior police officers and a local Conservative MP. The political establishment, state agents and their media allies sought to
maintain a united front in putting their case against the crowd.

What has changed in the past 27 years is not the facts of what
happened at Hillsborough, but the ability of the old political establishment to
maintain its version of the truth.

The collapse of coherence and solidarity
within those circles became apparent during the inquest, as for example when
barristers representing the Police Federation pressed former top cop
Duckenfield into effectively admitting he was responsible for the deaths on the
day.

Now everybody from Tory ministers to police commissioners wants to blame
others and talk about Hillsborough as if they are members of the Justice
campaign.

That should not lead the rest of us to forget that The Truth is often
a politically expedient commodity.

4)
The fan-bashing spirit of Hillsborough lives

The Hillsborough campaigners have been widely praised for
keeping alive the spirit of the victims and the fans.

Yet we should recognise
that the other side of the spirit of Hillsborough – the contempt for
working-class football fans – lives on, too.

Back then, supporters were often branded as hooligans,
animals and scum; as one mid-Eighties newspaper famously described it, football
was ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people,
who deter decent folk from turning up’.

Nobody needs to pretend that there was
no football hooliganism in the Eighties; we need only recall the
often-forgotten disaster at Heysel, in which 32 Italians (and 7 others) died
when a wall collapsed after they were charged by Liverpool fans before the 1985
European Cup final against Juventus.

But that was no justification for the
paramilitary policing of football crowds that led to Hillsborough.

These days, attempts to police football fans are more
insidious.

The spectre of hooliganism has largely been laid to rest by
comprehensive policing systems and high ticket prices that mean the average
Premier League spectator is now a relatively sedate middle-aged bloke.

The
authorities are still preoccupied with controlling the crowds, but now the
emphasis is on controlling not just what they do, but what fans can say, sing
and even think in the no-smoking/swearing/standing stadiums and beyond.

The
high-minded media is more likely to brand old-fashioned football fans
‘knuckle-dragging’ racists, misogynists and homophobes than hooligans.

In
‘progressive’ Scotland, the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening
Communications Act has even resulted in fans being jailed for singing ‘naughty’
songs.

Scratch the surface and this reveals much the same spirit
of fear and loathing for the mass of football fans that was behind both the
Hillsborough disaster and the attempts to blame Liverpool supporters for
causing their own tragedy.

Now some commentators even want to contrast the
well-behaved Liverpool supporters with others – thus maintaining a dual
attitude of both solidarity with the Hillsborough victims and disdain for
vulgar football fandom.

Days after the inquest verdicts, a headline in theGuardian(no surprises there) argued that ‘The
authorities failed the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough. But so did the real
hooligans’, by creating ‘the excuse’ for cages and harsh policing at matches.

So, Liverpool supporters may have been blameless, but it still appears that for
some the ‘real hooligans’ among football fans were partly to blame.

The inquest jury’s verdict that the fans bore no responsibility
for the disaster was a welcome rebuttal of all the old false allegations
blaming drunken fans.

Yet there is no need to pretend that the blameless
Liverpool fans on that day must all have been sober saints.

Neither are
Leicester fans this week, nor any other set of football supporters.

And nor
should anybody expect them to behave like a choir on their way to a sanctified
service, rather than a raucous crowd out to enjoy a big match.

It will be another tragedy if the legacy of Hillsborough is
twisted to help further smother the spirit of football.